Let’s take another look at CFDMay 2006This month, we trawl through the latest releases and products that can help you simulate the thermal-fluid interactions that are critical to your design project It’s been a while since I last covered the subject of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), so this month’s column is dedicated to the subject with my quick roundup of CFD software news. Incidentally, if you want to learn more about this subject, I urge you to go to one of the largest online resources of CFD information, CFD Online (www.cfd-online.com).
CD-Adapco (www.cd-adapco.com) has just released the latest version (4) of its CFD package, STAR-CD – much beloved by the automotive industry. The software is now fully ‘polyhedra-enabled’; compared with tetrahedral meshes, polyhedral meshes are more accurate, use less memory, converge faster and require fewer cells in order to obtain the same level of accuracy. Version 4, which is now fully 64-bit compatible, introduces free surface modelling and extends the software’s transient capabilities with a new solution algorithm.
Blue Ridge Dynamics’ (www.cfdesign.com) CFDesign 8.0 CFD package is also now available for 64-bit computing environments. The 64-bit version offers improved performance and scalability, particularly for memory intensive fluid flow and heat transfer simulations. Blue Ridge claims that complex calculations that used to take hours to complete on 32-bit systems, now take minutes. Equally, models that were considered too big for the 32-bit environment are now viable candidates for CFD analysis.
Fluent (www.fluent.com) has been busy, too. The company has just released the third version of FloWizard in 18 months, ensuring that this major CFD product stays ahead of the game. Version 2.1 adds CAD connections to Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and NX, allowing users to send their models to FloWizard at the click of a mouse. The software now includes a new rotating machinery model to predict flow and pressure in pumps, fans and turbines.
B.A.R Formula 1 spin-off, Advantage CFD (www.advantage-cfd.co.uk) has taken up the European distributorship for Sculptor, a shape deformation module for CFD. It allows the shape of an object and the surrounding volume mesh to be deformed smoothly and arbitrarily, without having to go back and redraw the CAD model, re-mesh and re-apply the boundary conditions. Sculptor can read in a number of leading CFD solvers and make shape changes directly to the files.
Flomerics (www.flomerics.com) has released version 6 of its Flovent software for airflow prediction in buildings, with improved 3D visualisation and enhanced treatment for glazed surfaces, curvilinear geometry, angled fans, centrifugal blowers and air-recirculation devices. Support for the latest 64-bit processors is also available. The software creates a source of ‘virtual particles’ anywhere in the solution domain in order to visualise 3D airflow to and from that source.
The open CFD platform, OpenFOAM (www.opencfd.co.uk) is now in version 1.3. Improvements have been made to the software’s parallel running, speed and memory storage, and new discretisation schemes have been added to improve accuracy and stability of tetrahedral meshes.
Many turbomachinery companies employ general-purpose CFD codes to assess noise and cavitation issues. Mesh generation can be quite time consuming in these applications, which is why ADT (www.adtechnology.co.uk) has launched a new product, TURBOcfd, which streamlines the application of CFD to blade design in these specialised areas. The code, which will be made available as a package together with ADT’s TURBOdesign-1 inverse design method, includes automatic mesh generation and a turbomachinery-specific post processor.
Flownex (www.flownex.com), now in version 6.8, covers a wide range of thermal-fluid systems ranging from simple pipe networks to gas turbines or combined cycle power plants. It is described as a ‘systems’ CFD code, which means that component models with different levels of complexity (analytical models to 2D or 3D CFD models) are linked together in a network to represent a complex system.
Last time I talked about CFD, I suggested using a separate, specialist software package, Tecplot (www.tecplot.co.uk) for postprocessing the data. This month they're releasing a new version, Tecplot 360, that's expanded into a full CFD postprocessing tool to help you extract the information you need from your data. It's well worth a look.
Pointwise (www.pointwise.com) has also just released version 15.09 of its CFD meshing software, Gridgen, now offering both solid modelling and solid meshing. ‘Fault-tolerant’ meshing avoids the issue of ‘CAD repair’ by directly healing the mesh over gaps and overlaps using computations of proximity and adjacency. However, by importing solid data directly or assembling solids in Gridgen, the mesher is able to determine adjacency implicitly from the CAD topology. There is no need to compute proximity, making the system much more efficient. In addition to supporting solid models the new version of Gridgen also supports ‘quilts’ – topologically linked surfaces that are to be meshed as a single unit.
Dr Know's recommended download is Tecplot 360 Demo or Tecplot Focus Demo. Download yours today: http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/download/dlddsp/9111/0/All/Tecplot+Focus+Trial+Version.html
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